The Ability to Withstand Magnification

The other night a friend came over for dinner and he brought with him a bottle of white Burgundy, a wine that reminded me why it is that I love white Burgundy. Not that I needed a reminder - some of the finest wines I've ever drunk have been white Burgundies. I'm not put off by the bottles that don't live up to expectations, even though these can be costly disappointments. Wine in all categories can be disappointing, and I don't buy the cliché about Burgundy being "hit or miss." All wine is hit or miss when you get right down to it. Storage, bottle variation, and many other factors can reduce the experience of any given wine. And when white Burgundy is on, it is as thrilling as wine can be, to my taste.

The funny thing is, on paper this wine didn't have to be so good. 1994 is not considered to be a good vintage, for one. And this wine comes from Puligny, but the producer is better known for white wines from Meursault. That said, the 1994 Robert Ampeau & Fils Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru Les Combettes was a very good wine. Not the greatest of white Burgundies that I've had, even recently, but very good, particularly considering the difficult vintage. And the wine made me think quite a bit.

We opened it and tasted, maybe a half hour or so before we would begin drinking it. My friend who brought the wine was not terribly impressed, and I understood why - it seemed dilute, without much concentration. But we had graduated college in 1994, and we also were probably not terribly concentrated in 1994, needing time to gain complexity and become more serious. We have since done that, and with a little air, the wine did too. It never fully lost that dilute feeling, but it did blossom aromatically and although not a wine with much sap or richness of body, it absolutely and clearly articulated itself and showed a very lovely delicacy to its aromas and flavors. That's not a cop out way of explaining away a mute wine. It is a truthful description of the wine's character.

Not every wine will be powerful, rich, and with concentrated flavors. You already know that, but I'm just saying. Mature white Burgundy can be great and can do so in the character of something light in body, delicate, almost fragile. I've not had other vintages of this wine so I don't know, maybe this is always the character of Ampeau's Combottes. Somehow, I doubt it. 1994 was not an easy year, with lots of rain and other problems. Many people wrote off the vintage, and today's prices for '94s are lower than any other vintage in the '90s. But I've had several examples of 1994 Burgundy in the past months and have really enjoyed them.

So, what about this particular wine: I loved the clean and pure articulation of aroma, incense and stone and spring water. And I loved the delicate way those aromas tranlslated on the palate, finishing with some pungency, leaving a lingering incense and mineral essence that didn't so much stain the palate, but left an impression nonetheless.

In his classic book Making Sense of Burgundy, Matt Kramer writes about Puligny-Montrachet:

The goût de terroir of Puligny seems somehow more sharply etched than elsewhere. The fruit is defined and powerful yet restrained, like the musculature of a martial artist. Its perfect composition is revealed by its ability to withstand magnification. As you increase resolution, from commune level Puligny to premier cru and then zoom to Batard-, Chevlalier- and Le Montrachet, you find no blemishes, no distortions in taste or balance.

I hadn't read this section of the book in a while and the day after drinking this wine, went back for a look. This paragraph struck me in its description of Puligny's restrained character, something that I am learning to see in the wines, especially in relation to the brawnier wines of Meursault, Puligny's neighbor to the north. Combettes is a vineyard that borders on the Meursault appellation, and probably has more flesh than some Puligny wines (which may have something to do with why Ampeau's Combettes in 1994 is as successful as it is). And still, the character of this Combettes, to me anyway, was unmistakably Puligny.

Kramer also talked about the ability to withstand magnification, and I like thinking about this. Maybe the idea can be extended to vintage. In a riper vintage like 2003 for example, the essential restraint should still be evident. And in 1994, for example, a lesser vintage, there is no distortion in taste or balance.

Maybe this sounds like a simplistic thing to say, but maybe it would be easier for those of us who love Burgundy if we stop hoping that every bottle will be a great thing, if we let go of our ideas of the heights a bottle should ascend to. I'm not saying that we should dumb it down or stop expecting the wines to be great. But that it's also nice to allow a 1994 to be a 1994, and to appreciate it for whatever its charms may be.

Tidbits

Been busy and not able to write as often, but please don't think that means I've been starving and not drinking anything interesting. Oh no, my friends, I've been a very lucky Brooklynguy lately, in large part due to the generosity of friends. Here are some tidbits, things from the past few weeks that are worth mentioning:

Slope Farms sells pork now. I cannot tell you how excited I am about this. Ken and Linda Jaffe (former Brooklynites who moved to the Catskills) are dedicated to farming healthy cows, and theirs is my absolute favorite beef. I'm not sure of the details on this new pork venture, but I hear they have an elder and respected neighbor who advised them as they set up their farm. This neighbor raises pigs. The Jaffes now sell their neighbor's pork. Look at the marbling on the meat, and the beautiful color. I've tried the chops and a rib roast so far, and WHOA, this is very very good pork.

And on the other end of the food spectrum, processed food, I've discovered what I now believe to be one of the finest canned food products - Heinz baked beans, the kind they sell in England. These are done in tomato sauce, not in that cloying brown sugary sauce that our baked beans swim in. If you see these, try them. Okay, they're canned, but they're actually not that bad for you. And they taste so very good.

Some wine too...

2001 was not a very good vintage in Champagne. Not many vintage wines from that year - it was rainy, especially in the weeks leading up to harvest, there was a lot of rot, and it was a challenge for the grapes to ripen. I know from reading ChampagneGuide.net that this is considered to be one of the most challenging vintages of the past 20 years. So it was fascinating to have the opportunity to try a vintage wine from 2001, Jean Vesselle's Brut Prestige. This wine is all Bouzy, a blend of 70% Pinot Noir and 30% Chardonnay, but it reminded me of a wine I tasted a few years ago by Moutard that is made with the obscure grapes of Champagne, things like Arbanne and Petit Meslier. The wine had overt notes of green herbs and leafy vegetables, and I think it would have benefited from a few grams more of dosage (it was dosed at 3 grams, I believe). But really, it was good wine, well balanced and particularly lovely on the nose. I cannot say that it is what I dream of when I want Champagne, but it was a very good wine, and a reminder that it is possible to enjoy well-made wine from bad vintages.

I had dinner with a few friends and we each brought wine to the restaurant. These were good wines, on paper anyway. We arrived at 7:00, opened everything, and it was clear that nothing was showing very well. After a little while, I don't know how long exactly, but probably an hour or so, all of the sudden everything was fantastic.

I'm talking about a bottle of 2000 Vincent Dauvissat Chablis Les Clos that was butterscotch pudding for a while, and then turned into this detailed and focused thing of beauty. Some caramel notes, but also a bunch of freshly picked white honeysuckle. Pungent, long, and intense with a saline edge to the finish, this was a beautiful wine, a very special treat.

And the 1990 Robert Ampeau Volnay Santenots, a wine that began better than the others, but still was a tangled mess. And an hour later it was gorgeous - a complex and beguiling nose that had that vibrant mature-wine-pungency thing. Flowers, musky and gamy, but in the end, very much about stone. And it is the texture that gets you - the wine couldn't be more silky, and this silk surrounds what essentially is a wine about rock. Textbook Volnay, and a truly compelling and lovely wine.

And the 2002 Paul Bara Bouzy Rouge Coteaux Champenois, a wine that was probably the messiest of all when we first opened it, all bramble and pitch black fruit and very disjointed. But later on, I swear this wine was the freshest and most detailed wet stone basket of ripe strawberries, so pure and elegant, light as a feather. And the 1999 Eric Texier Côte-Rôtie, a wine that fooled all of us. It was a red fruit mash at first - I would have guessed a Grenache heavy wine from further south had I tasted it blind. This one took the longest to come around, but when it did it was a classic old school bloody, meaty, black olivey, and very mineral northern Rhône Syrah.

Can I tell you that the next day I learned that our dinner occurred on a flower day...but only after 8:00 PM. Why do these annoying coincidences keep happening with the confounded biodynamic calendar and the way wines taste?

At a restaurant in Boston I drank a bottle of 2007 Didier Dagueneau Blanc Fumé de Pouilly. The wine was beautiful, a perfect mingling of freshness, tension, elegance, and quiet intensity. It was not in any way showy, and was amazing in its perfect harmony, not for any one particular characteristic of aroma or flavor. Wow, I wish I had more experience with Dagueneau's wines. They are awfully expensive now.

I recently drank an Emidio Pepe wine for the first time, the 2001 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. It had been open for hours before we drank it with dinner. I loved it, really loved it. Such interesting and delicious wine. Jet black fruit, very brawny, but detailed and fresh, with cooling herbal aromas, and a streak of something like tar and leather. It was lovely with the aforementioned Slope Farms pork roast, and I must find a way to drink this iconic (and expensive, and apparently very variable) wine again.

Lastly, look at this nice list of white wines by the glass. This is at the restaurant Herbsainte in New Orleans. I was down there recently for work, and stopped in to have a cocktail before retiring to my hotel room. But before I could order, I overheard the bartender telling another man that there was a buttermilk fried Louisiana frog legs special that evening. Hmmm.

Forget the cocktail - I ordered a glass of El Maetsro Sierra Fino (!) and the frog legs. Well that whole situation was so delicious, that I decided to keep going, and drank a glass of the 2010 Domaine du Closel Savennières La Jalousie with a little plate of Gulf shrimp and grits with okra. Even more delicious! You know, I used to love Closel but I kind of gave up on the wines after not liking anything after 2002 (and after the last of my 2002's showed oxidized). I told friends that I was done with the wines. Well, I have no idea what's really going on with Closel, but honestly, this 2010 was just excellent - fresh, pure, balanced, showing typical wooly and waxy notes and lots of minerality. A reminder to me not to make pronouncements about wine. I just don't have the years of drinking experience to make pronouncements.

Dinner with the Wines of Savigny-lès-Beaune

I had some of the fellas over the other night to have dinner and drink red wine from Savigny-lès-Beaune. Why Savigny-lès-Beaune? Well, a top bottle (not counting Leroy's Narbontons) costs about $50, a good villages wine should be in the mid $30's. That's real money, but it's pretty cheap as far as Burgundy goes. I wanted to drink several examples of the best bottles to see if they are undervalued within the pantheon of Burgundy terroir, or if they are simply more of that overpriced but merely decent wine from Burgundy.

Any list of the best producers in Savigny would include Domaine Simon Bize, Domaine Jean-Marc et Hugues Pavelot, and Chandon de Briailles. Others include Maurice Écard, Camus-Bruchon, and Catherine et Claude Maréchal, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. There were 7 of us at dinner and although no one discussed what to bring in advance, we got a great mix of wines from great producers.

The shame of it is that nothing really showed all that well. I'm willing to bet it was a root day or a leaf day or something, because most of the wines didn't show much energy, their aromatics were subdued. Still, I learned a lot from this, particularly about the differences in terroir within Savigny-lès-Beaune.

If you take a look at this map from the Burgundy-Report site, you can see that a river runs east/west through Savigny-lès-Beaune. The vineyards to the north of the river typically have heavier soils that are rich with clay. They lie on hills with southern exposure. These can be rich, dense wines. The north-side vineyard with the best potential is probably Aux Vergelesses, a 1er Cru that borders the 1er Crus of Pernand Vergelesses. The other 1er Cru sites that reliably produce very good wines include Les Fournaux, Gravains, Lavières, Aux Guettes, and Serpentières.

South of the river the soils are sandier, more gravelly, and the exposure isn't as good. But it is from here that the appellation's most esteemed wines have traditionally come. The 1er Cru Dominode vineyard (always called "Les Jarrons" on vineyard maps) is said to make the finest wines of Savigny, although that might change as Patrick Bize's wines from Aux Vergelesses and Les Fournaux age and fully reveal themselves. Next to Dominode is Les Narbantons, a 1er Cru made famous by Lalou Bize at Domaine Leroy (but one can buy 3 or 4 bottles of Pavelot Dominode for the same price as one bottle of Leroy Narbantons).

We began with a couple of white wines and gougères, my first attempt at making the delicious cheese puffs that are so common in Burgundy. The 2007 Domaine Marcillet Savigny-lès-Beaune, $28, Savio Soares Selections, was a surprising wine. It's a humble villages wine that packs a lot of punch. I've had this wine on several occassions and liked it very much, but this time around I thought the oak was a bit too much. The others liked it a lot though, and 3 hours later the wine had indeed integrated beautifully, showing ripe fruit, minerals, and an earthy pungency that I associate with Savigny-lès-Beaune. Levi said that it might have been the wine of the night for him. I served this wine alongside the 2007 Chandon de Briailles Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Aux Vergelesses, $48, Imported by David Bowler, which showed rather poorly. I liked the tropical aromas I was getting immediately after I opened the bottle, but no one really liked it a half hour later. My friend Clarke said that it had a vodka-type spirit essence to it, which was right on. It wasn't flawed, it was just weird.

Among the red wines, the first flight was my favorite of the night. We drank the 2007 Jean-Marc et Hugues Pavelot Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru La Dominode, $55, Becky Wasserman Selections, and the 2007 Simon Bize Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Aux Vergelesses, $52, Becky Wasserman Selections, with a hearty mushroom barley soup. These are both delicious wines that are quite forward and approachable, perhaps a characteristic of the 2007 vintage. Drinking them next to each other was a great lesson in Savigny-lès-Beaune terroir. The Pavelot Dominode showed a definite layer of gravelly stone underneath the pure and spicy red fruits. It was much less dense than the richer Bize wine, although no less intense. I liked it very much - it was my favorite wine of the night. The only question for me was whether or not it will age well, as it just didn't seem to have any excess or unresolved structure. The Bize Aux Vergelesses showed a darker fruit character and a much earthier nose, like wet clay. It had a lovely perfume and although it was drinking very well, it never fully unraveled and I imagine that it will do very well with 7-10 years of cellaring.

We then drank two Simon Bize wines with braised beef and turnips. The 2006 Savigny-lès-Beaune Les Bourgeots, $35, and the 2006 Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru Les Fournaux, $48. Les Bourgeots was aromatically closed, but showed pretty dark fruits on the palate and good balance. Les Fournaux had lovely floral and dark fruit aromatics, but was angular and awkward on the palate. These wines are probably starting to shut down. The next day I got to taste them again and they were both excellent. Bourgeots was a seamless expression of Savigny-lès-Beaune dark fruit and earth, completely pure and delicious, and drinking perfectly. Les Fournaux showed more depth and intensity of fruit, and still needed more time, although it was no longer awkward. Simon Bize's wines...very impressive.

I'm not going to go into much detail on the rest because none of them showed very well. Just a few notes-

Still with braised beef and turnips:
2004 Pavelot 1er Cru Les Gravains, $45. Some nice things here, good fruit, but the wine was surprisingly evolved, and showed what I found to be unpleasant seaweedy notes.
2001 Chandon de Briailles 1er Cru Les Lavieres, $45. A library release that, if what we drank is an accurate representation of the wine, should have stayed in the library. Just weird, with cloying fruit and lots of alcohol, completely disjointed and kind of swampy. Flawed? Not good wine? Who knows...

With cheeses, including a most incredibly runny Époisses:
1996 Pavelot 1er Cru La Dominode (magnum), $135. The only wine that provoked anything close to controversy, as some liked it more than others. I thought it was perfectly fine, but kind of anonymous and dull. It never really opened up, and I would be curious to know how it fared on day 2.
1990 Robert Ampeau Savigny-lès-Beaune, $40. Lots of fun to see what's going on with this bottle, a 20 year old villages wine from Savigny. But alas, it was pretty much dead on arrival. Yes, I know that you need to do a lot of aerating with Ampeau, and we swirled and swirled and opened it over an hour before drinking it, but all that was left was seaweed and rotting leaves.

Dinner with the In-Laws

That phrase alone is enough to send shivers down the spine of many of us. It's never easy to completely relax but if you and the husband/wife are in a good place together, it can be done. BrooklynLady and I are in such a place, luckily, because her folks flew in last Thursday from California and we had several dinners together, all in our living/dining room.

For the last dinner of this visit I decided to whip up something special, a little bit festive. But with tiny daughter needing attention, the occasion called for a meal that would be simple to prepare. I went with roast rack of lamb - rub it with mustard, garlic, herbs, throw it in the oven, let is rest, presto. Also some simple roast potatoes with white truffle oil, and some braised kale. Everything worked out well, I am happy to say, and the in-laws were appreciative and in YUM-land.

I wanted to serve something interesting as an aperitif, I didn't feel like defaulting to Champagne. Not that there's anything wrong with Champs, but we did that on Thursday night. How about something elegant and festive in a white wine? I opened a bottle of Zind Humbrecht Gewurztraminer, an Alsace producer I have been meaning to try for a while now. Both Fork and Bottle (if you read the WBW 29 Biodynamic Roundup, you already know this) and The Wine Doctor have nice profiles of this biodynamic producer, so take a peek.

2004 Zind Humbrecht Gewurztraminer Wintzenheim, $28.
Not vieille vignes, not a grand cru vineyard, this is more of an "entry level" Gewurz from the Zind. I LOVED it, and will definitely investigate Zind Humbrecht further. Deep golden color, very inviting. Expansive floral aromas, also some classic lychee, some citrus, and a touch of honey. And that's just the nose, people! First impression of the palate is purity lean and clean wine, surprisingly so for a wine with innate sweetness. The wine zings with the tension that comes from a perfect mixture of sweet yellow fruit and acidity. The label indicates that this wine is a "2" out of 5 on the sweetness index, and this honeyed and floral residual sugar carried through on the long and elegant finish. I wanted more and more of this wine. I want some now...

Father-in-law stunned us by bringing to this dinner a bottle of mature Burgundy wine, a 1993 Volnay 1er Cru by Robert Ampeau, a producer I had never encountered. It gets mostly excellent reviews from the community on Cellar Tracker, and one of the reviews said that it needs time to open up. Good thing I read that note...

1993 Domaine Robert Ampeau et Fils Volnay Santenots 1er Cru
Smells of seaweed and rotting vegetables when first opened. Reminded me of the older regional wine I opened with cheese at our holiday wine dinner. Not good. But almost 3 hours later (thank you Cellar Tracker reviewers), by the time we sat down to our dinner, the nasty smells had completely blown off. Lovely tranparent ruby, no visible signs of aging. Enticing smells of sweet cooked cherries, some spices, and some musty earth undertones. Amazing, how much changed in the nose over a few hours. Silky texture, flavors of cooked red fruit and clay earth with some dried leaf character - an interesting and delicious mature Burgundy. Made fast and close friends with the food too. This wine is available at Crush in Manhattan for $70, and although I really enjoyed it, I am not sure if that represents a great value. I guess if you're in the market specifically for a mature red Burgundy, it is a good value, but if you have $70 to spend on any bottle of red Burgundy...not so sure.

I opened a half bottle of dessert wine as a final flourish, a 2002 Grgich Hills Violetta, $30 (on secondary market). I have enjoyed, but not loved this wine in the past, and this was the best showing thus far. This is a late harvest blend of mostly Chardonnay (65-70% I think), Riesling, and Sauvignon Blanc. Deep yellow with some light orange tint. Orange blossom and honey smells, some citrus peel. Fat and intense on the palate, with confectioners sugar and orange liquor at first, then some floral and honey flavors. A somewhat flabby and unfocused finish prevents this wine from soaring, in my opinion, but it is certainly a treat.

So the in-laws had a great time at dinner, and we did too - a successful evening to be sure. BrooklynBabyGirl slept through almost the whole thing too. And how lovely was that gesture, bringing that lovely old Burgundy? Good luck with your dinners with the in-laws.